My Birds Don’t Chirp No More

Mr. Wren and his three dowdy wives employed to brighten my every day. Tail erect, he would chirp on my love swing resplendent in the iridescent blue coat and tone-matched pale-blue eye-shadow. He would watch his grey wives take turns to perform battle with the imagined intruders within their territory conversely with the window pane (ostensibly another very aggressive wren because the pane merely mirrored Mrs. Wren). Being an one-way mirror, my cat and my dachshund would sit in my side of the pane, drooling and window-shopping, as it were. It became a daily entertainment ritual.

Now Mr. Wren with his fantastic wives are gone and instead I have a well-heeled, neighborhood cat cruising past my window each morning searching for any residual Mrs. Wrens to supplement his $3 pilchards-in-aspic breakfast.

Luckily our local Government provides cat registration. Indeed they have appointed an Inspector to accomplish checks for unregistered cats. Our Inspector is coming to our neighborhood next week. Will the ‘wren-eating’ cat stay home to the census? Cats can do what cats have to do.

With considerably less resignation, I see the Cat Inspector up to now another example that Governments will perform what Governments need to do, which is grow and grow and grow… on busy, busy, busy, work; implementing Government Busyness, one might say. Here is this week’s demonstration of Government Busyness.

My sister-in-law purchased a house about 11 years ago. Prior to the purchase, the place was tied up in probate for around 4 years. The deceased previous owner was as part of his eighties and owned your pet dog. By this reckoning your dog, if still alive, should be 15++ years old. This dog and my sister-in-law’s address must be computer-linked.

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The Local Government bureaucracy, in the quest for busywork, decided it is eligible for 15++ years’ worth of dog registration fees and sent a demand for back payment of fees. Now I know what are the readership pre-empting: the previous zero debt owing, debt collector story. Sorry, this story isn’t that good.

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Never having owned a dog in their own life, the demand received the contempt it deserved – yes, the trash can. Telephone assurances from your Local Government Officer in charge of Busyness that the matter will be dealt with gave a glimmer of hope that some sanity might prevail. But No!

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Last week she received two (why two?) dog tags in the mail plus a bill for registration first year for starters dog that for those intents and purposes had deceased many years ago. Needless to say the tags and bill were filed in the same cabinet because original demand – inside the bin.

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Here’s the rub: Multiply the societal price of this exercise by 1000 to pay the items and we don’t see and throw inside the cost with the Cat Inspector then multiply through the quantity of local Governments then multiply and multiply and multiply… The result is an enormous Global industry that produces nothing of value. The World needs manufacture of things worthwhile. Therein lies true wealth, not Gross National Product aggregated on Busywork!

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We don’t possess a Global Financial Crisis you will find there’s Bureaucracy Crisis. The frightening thing perhaps there is isn’t any agency to resist this bureaucratic blight on humanity. Bureaucrats breed to produce more bureaucrats and so they train each other well to entrench themselves inside a bath of sinecure, all at the expense with the hapless (and for the most part, helpless) taxpayer.